Behold the contronym
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Like platypuses and echidnas, those creepy monotremes of the animal kingdom, the world of words contains a few rare and paradoxical oddities of its own. Consider the contronym.
Sanction, cleave, seed and oversight are all contronyms. So is ‘off’. And there are at least another 70 of them in English.
‘His failure to provide proper oversight of the construction was his only oversight.’
In the first instance, oversight means to pay attention to something; in the second usage it means not to pay attention to something. Wow! The reason ‘oversight’ has come to have these two contradictory meanings is that it is the noun form of two separate verbs, ‘oversee’ and ‘overlook’, which can have contradictory meanings.
Off – ‘He turned the lights off.’/‘The alarm clock went off.’ (i.e. off/on)
Left – ‘When we left the house, only the pets were left.’ (departed/remained)
Weather – ‘He weathered the storm.’/‘The ancient rock was severely weathered.’ (withstood/diminished)
But with shorter contronyms, like ‘off’, ‘left’, ‘fast’ and ‘help’, it’s probably because they have been a part of the language for so long that a wide variety of meanings have attached (or cleaved – another contronym) to them, and eventually they’ve picked up one that contradicts the main one. In other words, it’s just a coincidence, but that doesn’t make it much less weird as far as I’m concerned.
Step through the looking-glass as you run your eye down this list and marvel at the English language’s eternal capacity for confusion and misdirection.
